5 key factors for successful cloud migration for your Atlassian tools

In October 2020 Atlassian announced the "end of life" for its server products in February 2024. With only limited time left, now is the time to start or ramp up your migration journey.

The "end of life" for Atlassian Server products refers to the point at which Atlassian discontinues support and maintenance for their server products. This means that Atlassian and their Marketplace Partners will no longer release new updates, bug fixes, security patches, or provide technical support for Atlassian Server Products or Marketplace Applications.

There are tangible benefits to migrating to the Atlassian Cloud, such as scalability, cost savings, accessibility, security, automated maintenance, integration possibilities, and vendor support. These advantages make Atlassian Cloud an appealing choice for businesses seeking a flexible, efficient, and collaborative environment for their Atlassian tools.

GLiNTECH received global recognition as Atlassian Partner of the Year 2021: Cloud Migration Services for outstanding contribution and achievements during the calendar year 2021. GLiNTECH was again recognised with the Partner of the Year in 2022 for Professional Services. These awards recognise exceptional efforts in developing new business, thought-leadership, methodology and products and services that complement cloud migrations.

Based on our extensive experience with Atlassian Cloud Migrations the GLiNTECH team has identified 5 key success factors crucial for a successful cloud migration.

1. Change Management - A migration is an exercise in change management. Ensuring people, process and tools are aligned is pertinent to the success in achieving your target state. GLiNTECH believes in setting expectations with key stakeholders from the outset. Some essential parts of this are:

a. Building a migration project team. Collaboration is crucial to managing a successful migration.

b. Communication is key! Have a clear communications plan in place.

c. Invest in training early on. GLiNTECH finds this small upfront investment contributes to productive testing and a more successful production migration. In the longer term, it leads to lower maintenance and operating expenses.

2. The Migration Plan - We follow Atlassian’s recommended framework for a successful cloud migration which includes six phases: Assess, Plan, Prep, Test, Migrate and Launch. We help ensure adequate time is devoted to every phase and that a thorough plan is mapped out, tested and revised accordingly prior to any production migration. Some key things to note:

a. Attempting to migrate everything over a weekend or at once may not be feasible. Data transfer times and post migration fixes can mean migrations take more than 72 hours on average, and, for a large enterprise migration, it will likely be longer and more complex.

b. Have a rollback plan, including in the event there are problems. Be clear about what the minimum is you’re happy to go live with.

c. Account for contingency in the migration budget. Cloud migrations are complex and having some contingency in your budget will give you options if things don’t go exactly to plan.

3. Data Quality and Rationalisation - A cloud migration is an opportunity to optimise your instances and set your organisation up for success in the long term. Aligning business data retention requirements to a data rationalisation initiative can help you achieve improvements in business operations, reduce risk and IT costs. 

a. Take the time to clean up your data. Moving to Atlassian Cloud allows you to review what data to bring across, as well as optimise your Jira & Confluence configuration. 

b. Review Marketplace apps and custom configurations. Most migration delays are because of problems with these. 

c. Prioritisation of projects. Post-migration fixes are a rolling process after the production cutover process. Determine which key projects receive priority will help improve the user experience and success of the project.

4. Pre-Migration Readiness - GLiNTECH offers a “Cloud Assessment Report” as part of this which can help outline risks and pre-migration readiness activities that will support project success.

5. Migration go-live - There is absolutely no time more crucial than the migration go-live windows. These are some of the key factors influencing the go-live decision.

a. Migrations are most successful when you have a dedicated migration team who are allocated and available for the duration of the migration.

b. Configuration changes. Any changes to configuration must not be allowed once migration testing is commenced or flagged with the migration team if necessary to identify any impact.

c. Change windows. Allow ample time in ‘change windows’ for migrations to complete and gain pre-approval for extensions to change windows.

The GLiNTECH migration team brings a wealth of experience in cloud migrations and some of the key lessons learnt along the way to ensure success. We have developed a quick-start accelerator to help clients identify the best path to Cloud, as well as uncover the additional Cloud capabilities such as Jira Work Management and Cloud Premium or Cloud Enterprise offerings.

Our Cloud Migration Assessment Package is the distillation of our experience having being engaged in dozens of large, complex cloud migrations to date and is only available to our customers. If your business is looking to migrate, chat to us today about booking in your Cloud Assessment Package to ensure Migration success.